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Atrocities
February 17th, 2005, 06:44 AM
I just wanted to know if any one else is having a problem logging onto or posting on the forum each night between 11pm PST and 2am PST?

For the last several days I have noticed that I cannot load the forum during those hours, or that if I can, it runs so slow that I can not do anything.

Perhaps it is performing a nightly back up or something?
Alneyan
February 17th, 2005, 06:49 AM
Same here, although it is in the morning, local time. The forum can still be browsed however: it takes about five minutes to load any page, so long as the page does not time out.
Jack Simth
February 17th, 2005, 07:16 AM
Same here.
DeadZone
February 17th, 2005, 07:23 AM
So its not just me thenm I was wondering
Atrocities
February 17th, 2005, 08:28 AM
Looks like its a forum thing. Like I said, most likely a back up process or something.
Mindi
February 17th, 2005, 02:00 PM
I'll see if Richard can look into this sometime this weekend. Our backups are on Sunday evening and should not be causing a problem the rest of the time. Sunday evening til Monday morning though I would always expect for it to be slow. We did recently switch servers, so I am assuming this is a recent thing?
RudyHuxtable
February 17th, 2005, 02:46 PM
Sorry guys, it's me. I've been hacking into the system and trying to find a way to steal all of the avatars on the boards so I can make a huge mosaic of Atrocities' head.
Mindi
February 17th, 2005, 09:55 PM
Well I was mistaken, the Sunday back ups were with the old server. The new server does indeed do automatic daily backups. They were set to kick off at 1am EST, we have changed that to 4am EST. The back-ups are taking longer than what we would like and we are looking into possible solutions to speed them up so that they don't take 2 hours at a time. But for now we have moved them to a more desirable time frame when less people will be on the board. So from 4am-6am EST will be the backups until we can move a few things around on the servers and speed things up. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause any of our users.
Atrocities
February 17th, 2005, 10:12 PM
Back ups are good. They make things safer. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Really its not a problem for me. I don't know about the others though, but I would rather have the site backed up than not. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
Mindi
February 17th, 2005, 10:20 PM
Yes we agree! Backups are good! But we want it to be at a time where it impacts the least amount of people and we would like it to happen in a timely fashion. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
Kamog
February 17th, 2005, 10:43 PM
Oh, so I'm not the only one who's had trouble with the forum late at night!
Jack Simth
February 18th, 2005, 02:20 AM
Pity you can't simply limit the backup's recource usage to 75% or something so that the forums can still handle traffic during a backup.
Will
February 18th, 2005, 03:06 AM
Probably a bit difficult to do that, when usually resource management only limits memory and/or processor usage. The thing that would be slowing down the forums that much would be disk access. We post a lot http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Maybe the backups can be changed, so that, say, once a month, the entire forums are dumped to backup. Then, to keep up to date, the nightly backups only backup posts between specific times. So, you would have the total backup for January, then on February 1, all the posts made from midnight to midnight EST would be backed up, repeat for each day of the month. Then, in the event that the backups are needed, just use the lastest monthly backup, then apply each daily backup to restore the forums fully. It increases by a bit the time needed to restore the forums, but decreases the time needed to backup dramatically.
rdouglass
February 18th, 2005, 01:29 PM
Now there's one area Windows server shines (at least 2K3). I can do "Shadow Volume" backups any time of day and the server never slows down a bit; don't even have to take anything off line.

Not saying at all that Windows is best, just a little comparison there.
narf poit chez BOOM
February 19th, 2005, 02:57 AM
Was wondering about that.
Strategia_In_Ultima
February 19th, 2005, 05:37 PM
Ah... so that was it. A few days back I was trying to browse the forums in the morning (I'm in the same time zone as Alneyan) and it worked well... until some time when I tried to reload all tabs to check for replies and it just kept loading. After a minute or so, pages started giving messages like "the operation timed out when conctacting (...)".

So I'm not the only one with the problem.